Ray Mallon wants the public to be his judge and jury. But secret
documents seen by David Rose detail the drug dealing, cover-ups and lies
that made a mockery of 'zero tolerance' policing

The Observer, Sunday February 17, 2002

After weeks of surveillance and intelligence-gathering, the Cleveland
Police Organised Crime Group were ready to make their move. Their target,
Michael Richardson, was believed to be one of Teesside's most prolific
drug dealers, turning over cocaine and heroin worth thousands of pounds
each week. Not a user himself, he tried to avoid carrying drugs on his
person, leaving his 'joeys' - addicted minions paid in fixes - to run
the risks.

It was 1.30pm on 1 May 1997, and the police had been told by a reliable
source that Richardson had had a recent delivery: inside his flat in the
Middlesbrough suburb of Marton were substantial amounts of heroin. Eight
officers smashed their way through the three mortice locks securing the
front door, and while Richardson and two associates looked on, searched
every inch of the property. They found nothing.

It wasn't poor intelligence which foiled the operation, but police
corruption. Less than an hour before Richardson had his door kicked in,
he received a phone call warning him what was about to happen. He used
the time to seal the heroin in plastic and 'plug' it - hide it in his
rectum. Later, the police discovered who gave him the tip-off - Brendon
Whitehead, a serving detective in Middlesbrough CID, who has since been
sacked.

The abortive raid on Richardson and the subsequent attempted cover-up
formed just part of the case against Detective Superintendent Ray 'Robocop'
Mallon, the flamboyant former Middlesbrough CID chief and arch-prophet
of 'zero tolerance' policing, who was once held out as a national role
model by the media, by the former Home Secretaries Michael Howard and
Jack Straw, and by Tony Blair.

Last week, more than four years after being suspended from duty,
Mallon pleaded guilty to 14 disciplinary charges, admitting that he repeatedly
lied, deliberately withheld evidence from senior officers, and turned
a blind eye to detectives who took and dealt hard drugs, and supplied
them to vulnerable suspects in custody. Paul Acres, the Hertfordshire
Chief Constable who presided over Mallon's police tribunal, ruled that
no fewer than 11 charges were individually serious enough to require his
resignation.

In a dramatic confrontation at Wednesday's meeting of the Cleveland
Police Authority, Barry Shaw, the chief constable, looked a defiant Mallon
directly in the eye as he publicly accused him of being at the centre
of an 'empire of evil'. Mallon, he said, had done all in his power to
try to suppress the truth, and had waged 'an unrelenting campaign to vilify
those seeking justice'. Shaking with anger, Shaw quoted Ian Bynoe, deputy
chairman of the independent Police Complaints Authority, who supervised
the Mallon investigation. The charges he had admitted 'cannot be dismissed
as the odd error of judgment or excusable mistake'. Instead, they were
'wholly incompatible with the standards required of even the most junior
of police staff'.

Aware that any comment he made might be considered prejudicial,
Shaw has waited since Mallon's suspension in November 1997 to have his
say. At 61 he is Britain's oldest chief constable, and has delayed his
retirement by at least two years, determined to conclude a case he views
as a vital test for the future of ethical policing, and fearful that any
successor might let the matter drop. Throughout that time he has endured
attacks by Mallon's powerful allies: the Labour peer Lord MacKenzie of
Framwellgate, a close personal friend of Mallon and the former chairman
of the Police Superintendents' Association, who has claimed time and again
that the allegations were 'trivial'; the MP for Middlesbrough South and
East Cleveland Ashok Kumar, who asked almost 50 parliamentary questions
and demanded Shaw's resignation; some of his own officers; and numerous
journalists in the local and national media.

The Observer has learnt that Mallon did not plead guilty once but
twice. After first admitting the charges on 4 February, Acres ordered
he return to the tribunal two days later and repeat the exercise, and
provide a firm assurance that he offered his pleas as an unequivocal acceptance
of guilt. In the privacy of the closed tribunal, Mallon meekly complied.
In public, last week he proved his assurance had been worthless, telling
reporters he was not really guilty at all. He had only pleaded guilty
in order to be sacked, he claimed, so he could leave the police in time
to stand in May as Middlesbrough's first elected mayor. Then, he insisted,
the city's people would be his 'judge and jury'.

Despite its length, the details of Operation Lancet, the codename
for the Mallon inquiry, have until today remained secret. However, The
Observer has now seen hundreds of pages of documents compiled by the investigators,
and can sketch its principal contours for the first time.

Ray Mallon moved to Middlesbrough in 1996, after a posting in Hartlepool
widely considered a stunning success. With his gym-honed physique and
sharp-shouldered suits, he was an exceptional motivator of staff, exhorting
them to still greater efforts in the war against crime with the passion
of a revivalist preacher. Mallon threw himself into the job with gusto.
If he did not manage to cut crime by 20% in his first year, he told the
media, he would resign.

Despite his evident enthusiasm, there was unease among his colleagues
at one of his first acts. Two years earlier, a Middlesbrough detective
had been transferred to uniform for acting improperly with one of his
informants. Even before Mallon began his new posting, the man was earnestly
lobbying him to allow him back in the CID. Mallon agreed, appointing him
to a new 'intelligence unit'. That officer was Brendon Whitehead.

At Mallon's weekly motivational sessions, he used to praise Whitehead
to his plainclothes and uniformed colleagues as a 'risk taker,' precisely
the kind of officer Middlesbrough needed to get the desired results. In
fact, as Mallon became increasingly aware, he was a reckless cocaine user,
whose relationships with criminals went far beyond the proper legal boundaries
governing contact between detectives and informants. Operation Lancet
took several statements from officers and civilians who reported Whitehead
taking drugs in local pubs, at least once snorting cocaine directly from
the bar.

In March 1997, evidence surfaced that another detective - who cannot
be named for legal reasons - had given a female prisoner heroin. On 23
May, still more serious claims emerged. Statements in the Lancet dossier
describe how Whitehead and two colleagues took a prisoner, Peter Matthews,
out of the police station for a drive. Matthews was a known heroin addict,
who had been arrested for burglary and theft. The ostensible purpose of
taking him out was to gather 'intelligence'.

Later, Matthews told Lancet what happened. Whitehead, he said, told
him he was going to take him 'off station and buy me a pint and get me
some gear. By this I mean heroin. When we left the police station DC Whitehead
was driving the car, we went to a garage not far from the police station'.
One of the other officers got out 'and said he was going for the gear
... we got to a pub somewhere. I had been given the gear, which I took.'
He was taken inside the pub and given two pints of lager. In his drugged
state, he was told to 'write something on official paper and I signed
this. I believe it was admissions to offences.'

However, on this occasion, the detectives' behaviour was impossible
to ignore. As Matthews was being led back to his cell, a uniformed officer
spotted a cigarette packet in his shirt pocket. Inside were the remains
of the heroin, and the rolled aluminium foil which he had used to smoke
it inside the detectives' car.

An official inquiry began, but Mallon said nothing of the concerns
he already had about Whitehead and his colleagues, and even arranged for
one of the officers to visit the cells in the middle of the night and
talk to Matthews again. A few days later he held a meeting for the CID.
According to the Lancet dossier, he told Whitehead: 'The biggest thing
you did wrong was getting caught.' Matthews, however, was a criminal,
'and no one would believe him'. He told the three detectives to say nothing.

The following week he held his regular motivational gathering. A
uniformed PC, who like most of those present knew all about the discovery
of Matthews's heroin, described Mallon's speech: 'He stated he liked officers
who were what he described as "troublemakers". He said if they had problems
they were to go and see him and he would sort out their problems. He then
singled out each of the three officers who had been involved with Matthews
and got each to confirm his comments that he helped officers in times
of trouble. I was flabbergasted.'

The raid on Michael Richardson was not the only major drugs operation
foiled by a tip-off from Middlesbrough police station which came to light
during Lancet. But the relationship which emerged between the trafficker
and the CID was extraordinary. Here too Mallon has pleaded guilty to what
amounts to a cynical cover-up. His role in this case became the trigger
for his suspension.

It was 6 October 1997: in the wake of the Matthews case, Lancet
was already under way, and suspicion over what had happened before Richardson's
door went in was running high. A pale, thin, sobbing girl, aged 16, presented
herself at the station, the supposed national centre of zero tolerance
policing. She said that she had been brutally beaten and raped by her
former boyfriend, Michael Richardson.

Over the next few hours, officers trained in coaxing statements
from the victims of sexual assaults took down her harrowing story. As
they did so, a parallel horror became apparent: that Richardson had been
protected for months by at least two detectives. One of them, she said,
was Whitehead, who had given Richardson a police-issue CS gas cannister
to use against rival criminals; had taken cocaine with him; had bought
heroin from him to give to prisoners in exchange for information; had
arranged for addicts who owed Richardson money to be arrested; and had
phoned him from the police station before the 1 May raid. She had been
present, and had seen Richardson stuff the drugs into his anus.

The girl was plainly terrified. A uniformed inspector took charge
of the case, and she told him 'she feared that if CID officers became
involved their association with Richardson would result in his release'.
Next morning, the inspector took her and her mother to see Mallon.

'Robocop' had been at the gym, and was dressed in a tracksuit; as
the meeting began, he was towel-drying his hair. He listened to the girl's
story with apparent sympathy. According to her statement, before she left
his office, 'Mr Mallon took my hand and kissed it and said something like,
"It's a pity Michael did not kiss you like that."'

Mallon's subsequent actions - all of which he has admitted - belied
that inappropriately affectionate attitude. The uniformed inspector had
drawn up a report, setting out the girl's allegations about Richardson's
relationship with detectives, and recommending an immediate inquiry. Mallon
sat beside him and scored out all the most incriminating details, ordering
him to produce an alternative, diluted version. They did not need to be
investigated, Mallon said, because they amounted merely to 'hearsay'.
Unfortunately for Mallon, the inspector kept the original, and supplied
it to Operation Lancet. As the disciplinary tribunal was much later to
comment, the deleted allegations 'were of a serious nature, well capable
of investigation and [must be] viewed as a further attempt to thwart a
proper investigation'.

Forced to stay silent by the rules of subjudice, Barry Shaw has
not found the past 51 months easy. He has endured anonymous death threats,
seemingly endless leaks to the media, and above all, further lies. For
example, Mallon claimed repeatedly that he was never formally interviewed
by Operation Lancet, protesting he was only too ready to answer all the
allegations if only he were given a chance. In fact, he was interviewed
twice, and on both occasions he exercised his right to make no comment.

'Zero tolerance sent a powerful message to the people of Teesside,'
Shaw said yesterday, 'to people who badly needed hope and encouragement.
That's why I endorsed it. But what happened was a total betrayal of what
zero tolerance stood for. Custody areas should be among the safest places
in the country. In Middlesbrough, they were a place where corrupt detectives
supplied hard drugs. If one isn't prepared to tackle this kind of issue
with whatever it takes, one shouldn't be a chief constable.'

Lancet uncovered many unpleasant facts.
But there was one question, Shaw said, to which it had no answer. 'The
thing I'll never know is why. If only he'd come to me and said, "Chief,
I'm out of my depth here, I've got officers taking and supplying drugs,
I may have made a few mistakes, I'm sorry and let's do something about
it." Instead he stuck to his lies and cover-ups and fought and fought.
Until quite a late stage he might have backed out of it. For whatever
reason, he chose not to.'